It takes a social worker, played with empathetic energy by Divya Dutta to point out the sheer nullity of Raghavan's life after the revenge would be complete. There is always room for the drama to slide open slippery doors that lead into unexpected truths about the quality of life lived on the edge of destruction. The tussle of oneupmanship between Raghavan and Laik never lapses into an incoherent and angry jumble of rhetorics and recrimination. What director Sriram Raghavan avoids at any cost is shallowness in the dynamics of vendetta. It's a remarkable achievement, sadly not matched by all of the screenwriting in this engaging authentic but flawed drama of crime and retribution. He can peer into Laik's murky soul and find redeemable humour. Rebellious minds can't see how self centred their aspirations are. Flawlessly cunning and diabolic, he goes from bank robbery to jail term to chronic escapee with a deep understanding of the humour that underlines all anti-social humour. No such problems arise in Nawaz's performance. But because Varun's inexperience shows up in sequences that expose his youth. The sequences showing the hero using sex as a weapon of revenge don't work not for the lack of intelligent writing. The love-making sequence with Huma Qureshi who plays a prostitute and Laik's girl is meant to be brutal but ends up being a burlesque of the real thing. There is a woman in a bra and lots of moaning sounds.
What follows is unintentionally hilarious. Raghavan and the wrongdoer's wife proceed to the bedroom. There is a sequence where our hero, rapidly degenerating into a vengeful sociopath tells his wrong-doer that he will forgive him if Raghavan is allowed to sleep with his wrongdoer's wife. But they make no real sense out of the material that the script throws into their orbit. So do two new characters played with panache by Vinay Pathak and Radhika Apte. Raghavan cannot make a film without incorporating the heist element.Ī bag filled with crores of money shows up in the second half to claim primacy as protagonist in the plot. The virus of over-ambition strikes the narrative much in the same way that tragedy strikes Raghavan's life. Varun Dhawan, a bit raw around the edges but nonetheless acutely effective as the grieving family-man, and Nawazuddin, flawlessly flamboyant as the sly villain who has willy-nilly destroyed the hero's life, together confer an overpowering immediacy to the proceedings.īut then, their collaborative might as the sinned and the sinner, begins to be dimmed by a digressive drama that impinges itself from the sidelines. The confrontational drama between the hero Raghavan and the villain Laik gets a massive, near-monumental fillip from the main actors.
We also don't know that they will be dead in the next 10 minutes, and our hero would shed his heroic skin as the plot progresses from being a human drama to a heist caper with a loot that is quite a hoot. We don't know yet that they are our hero Raghavan's universe. we catch a mother and child heading into their family car. The film opens on a busy road in Pune with traffic, passersby, hawkers and bystanders loitering in camera range. Insulated from the outside world, Raghav's festering pain spreads itself out in the narrative spanning a seductive facsimile of reality that jumps off the screen to claim our attention.įor a large part, "Badlapur" is an exceptionally engaging drama. It's as if director Sriram Raghavan and his co-writer Arijit Biswas wants to shut out all light from his protagonist Raghavan's life. As if the tree decided to get even with the axe by cutting off its own branches.Ĭast in the mould of the greatest redemptive dramas "Badlapur" has an ambitious ambiance of unmitigated doom irrigating almost every frame. While the film's pain-lashed topography in the first overture is exceptional - with every vein on Varun Dhawan's temples ringing a bell - the second overture gets audacious tongue-in-cheek, subversive and sometimes downright silly. "The tree remembers, the axe forgets," reads a proverb in the opening credits of a film that left me feeling like both the tree and the axe. Film: "Badlapur" Cast: Varun Dhawan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Huma Qureshi, Yami Gautam, Divya Dutta, Radhika Apte, Vinay Pathak Director: Sriram Raghavan Rating: ***1/2